Chapter I

7:00pm. Aaron's eyes shift away from the monitor towards the door. He silently counts the seconds until his mother enters. He sighs as he slowly realises that the door stays shut. Aaron reminisces about their past encounters... In his imagination, she enters with his food in her left hand. What it is depends on the weekday. Today's Saturday, so he pictures a staple from his childhood: self-made burgers with chips on the side. Each time, Aaron admires her punctuality when it comes to this. He never asks her why or how, since it isn't important enough for him to interrupt her from placing the food on his desk. He skips thinking about her mother kissing his cheeks as she leaves the room with the older dishes. Often, their interaction ends there. Luckily, he upholds complete freedom in his imaginations, so he properly thanks her.

These are the only times when his mother sees him. Not to misunderstand. She did try numerous times to get him out of his room, to no avail. He always fought back, unwilling to find a new job or do a redo of his school grades by going to the night school. Not even socialising. He grew increasingly annoyed, once loud enough for her to get scared. She lost count of how often she tried. Then, it stopped. After that, Aaron saw her quietly sigh or shake her head to herself a couple of times. And then, it stopped too.

When he's bored, he subconsciously listens to her mother talking on the phone next-door. He picks up on some of the sentences but is mostly distracted by his thoughts about work or upcoming plans for his games. Still, one snippet of a conversation stays on his mind.

"I've already looked through numerous guides, okay? I just- I don't know."

"..."

"I'm aware, but there is like a part of me that keeps telling me otherwise. I used to be so much around him and now... I can't even say anything anymore... I feel ashamed. I could be doing more than this..."

"..."

The clock quietly ticks. Seeing no point in staring at the door for minutes, Aaron looks around his familiar bedroom. A bed, wardrobe, shelves and a desk. The standing shelf and desk leave no space on their side. About two steps into his room, one could easily tap the desk with their right elbow and, at the same time, use the other elbow to tap the edge of the wardrobe. The other side, opposite of the wardrobe and the main door lies the bed, window and then the standing shelf again, taking up all of the wall's width. To allow Aaron to be in close proximity of the window, nothing stands in front of it.

Tissues lie around on the floor, dirty clothes in every corner of the room, and the blanket resting with one of its halves on the bed - the other warming the floor instead. The so-called "collectables" catch dust on the shelves. Three hanging shelves are placed above the bed and another two above that are aligned to the left. They're just a singular wooden piece each, so there isn't a way to have an item lean on either side.

Normally, a person would gravitate towards establishing standards such as "books", "accolades" and "toys" on each shelf, while Aaron completely disregards it. One board has a mix of both washed and unwashed underwear, important papers, awards from his kindergarten, a couple burned CDs and other useless items like a scrambled cube, which he can't solve, or a pen he got when he got advertised to. Another board had a broken mouse (perhaps someone needed the electronics inside it?), used tissues (he was too lazy to get out of his bed), lip balm (buried and unused since years), a lunchbox with dinosaur stickers (luckily emptied and washed) and a decade old smartphone with its screen cracked (it's a surprise he continued to use it for a year). All the other boards have the same mess, with other "collectables".

One would be surprised that all the trash is still holding up. Although, when Aaron was still a newbie in his "collectable"-stacking game, the trash fell down on him in his sleep. Luckily, he refrained from putting his dumbbell on it, afraid that the shelf would break. Not everything is filled with "collectables", though. Aaron reserves a special place in the standing shelf for his grand amount of candy.

There is a bathroom directly connected to his bedroom, the door in-between the bed and the wide wardrobe. One would have to climb over a copious amount of trash (including dirty clothes) to get there. He tries to make the piles of trash look less bad by leaving his lights off, but the light emitting from the desktop screen isn't helping at all.

Reminded once again of the fact that he should be tidying his room, Aaron faintly shakes his and seeks for a better view. He looks out of the window. A street market points directly forward, branching off the main street he lives at. Regional souvenirs, cultural restaurants that are foreign to this country, a phone repair shop that looks like it's been established for money washing and many other attract tourists each season. The city's influx is at a high, typical for the summer. The sun sets as the shops turn on their outer lights.

Aaron's view is slightly blocked by the droplets clashing against the window. Their sound akin to white noise eases his mind, the mumbled crowd on the streets adding on to the ambience. The rain is always there to comfort him, regardless of if he were to be ever outside. It's as though he is finally empathised with, as if the rain is telling him that it's fine to feel melancholic. Looking through the water resting on his window, he watches people in a jog trying to find cover. His gaze stops at the families and the worst of all: Couples.

He hastily looks away in disgust and lands on the main street. The manhole covers are busy as some of the water bypass them and flow down the asphalt instead. He lampoons.

"I'm glad I don't have to come back from work. Even with an umbrella would I be drenched."

"Work"... His mother will always snap back if he mentions the time spent on his computer "work". He exhales deeply. Both in slight annoyance but also in resignation.

A black-suited man runs along the street, right to left, with a briefcase over his head. He's soaked. It seems like he has no means to drive by car, like him and his mother. Unlike them, he probably has a reason other than being too poor for that. Maybe his car got broken in and the wheels got punctured, who knows. Aaron scuffs.

"I bet he's going home to a 'loving wife'.

"The heavy rain makes her worried about his 'dear lover'. Then, she will proceed to ready up a hot bath for him. To make him relax even more, she probably will make him his favourite meal to make him feel most satisfied.

"And finally, the cherry on top in bed..."

Aaron groans as he rubs his eyes with his palm. He speeds up in anger, as though he tries to put out the fire in his eye sockets. Finally, he leaves his eyes alone as he turns around and checks the time. The clock above the main door turns its hands. He struggles to look more closely, now that his eyes hallucinate colourful spots.

The minute-hand seems to be quite past its zenith, which would mean that his mother is unfashionably late. He raises doubts about the validity of the clock for the first time ever. To be sure, he takes an additional look on his monitor. 7:04pm. Well, that's odd. He checks if there were any messages from his mother sent his way. None, not ever since he got up from his bed in the midday. No sign of hers, as if she suddenly disappeared.

Unwilling to build up any stress, Aaron attempts to quickly find a reason. Yes! His mother must be avoiding the heavy rain! She might not want to get soaked and get ill. She needs to be consistently available for both her job and housework, after all. As to why she isn't sending any messages, it is probably because she is panicking so much about being late for Aaron's meal. The first time in years! There is nothing worse than the feeling of breaking a good habit. It likely isn't a satisfying explanation for any other person, but for Aaron, it is good enough.

Content with his answer, Aaron takes a seat and his hands take control of the keyboard. He strictly follows the advice by the self-acclaimed keyboard experts. The left- and right-hand rest on the middle row, quickening his typing speed. The fingers only move to their assigned spots. Is it actually better than anything else? Probably not. On the screen are sentences describing what he witnessed yesterday and the former half of today. The cursor blinks, waiting for him to continue writing. Everything but creativity is occupying his mind. The new words spell out the events of Aaron's evening; he types that he took a look around in his room and outside the window. Aaron describes his resentment towards the black-suited man. He writes down that his mother is experiencing difficulties returning. What else is there... Aaron tries to think of anything else to say. His hands slow down to a halt. Unfortunately, there is nothing more to say. He breathes in and pinches his glabella.

"I should probably pick up a hobby or two."

Aaron half-heartedly acknowledges his current life as lacklustre. Considering the entire autobiography he has written so far, people already go through the things he does, just on a healthy basis. They would read only one day of his, if even. Reading in shame and, for the few, with pity. Yet he continues biographing. Each day, with the same familiar words for waking up, eating, consuming entertainment, writing and sleeping.

Aaron has a special reason for being persistent with it. It's the only bit of motivation to get up out of his bed. An example: A person who would spend all day consuming pornography, watching reality shows and read about a new online drama each hour would lose track of time. They would start to forget what they did in a specific month, with each memory intertwining and forming into a big incoherent mess. Aaron wants to distance himself from this. Not from the former, to be clear, but from losing the ability to distinguish the days. Thus, he continues spending time with pornos, shows and dramas each day but with writing about this on top. Ah! There goes another train of thought to type out. His writing continues.

After almost an hour, he copies all of the text he typed out and pastes it into a blog post. All of his posts get published on My-Life. Going along with its name, it's an internet platform for people talking about their life. Normally, if someone goes on My-Life, they will get to see the algorithmic feed one would scroll through on default. In the nature of attention spans and how the algorithmic boosts reten-tion rates, these feeds are filled with short opinions. They're about 280 characters long, at maximum.

But in the past, it used to be a forum. They originally had boards of various topics, and people liked to write long texts in them. For example, there is a topic for people talking about their unique jobs.

There has been one who talked about getting paid highly for selling magical pendants with enchantments written in his self-made language. His community was deeply invested about his items. Not for actually believing in any of the mysticism, but for trying to learn about the language. Another post talked about how a user worked as a professional puzzle solver, with contracts asking her to give feedback. How good were the clues? How long did it take her to solve it?

"You don't get paid a lot for this, but for being able to pursue my dearest hobby, I am very happy with it.

"And these puzzle boxes? Wow, I just want to say that everyone engineering them deserve my fullest appreciation! I love them!"

A problem about hosting these stories is the lack of funding. In a natural cycle of trying to improve their economical state, My-Life first implemented a subscription system, which forced members to pay money to write the same amount of content as in the past. It was a controversial decision. The major share of the users strook and forced them to revert the changes. That's why My-Life removed the subscription again and introduced a sister site instead. The sister site, also called My-Life, grew to be a solid competition against other sites trying to commercialise the same concept.

My-Life (the company) thought it would be a good idea to have both sites be named identically, so that disoriented people would accidentally land on the feed in lieu of the financially worse forum. To combat the confusing terminology, users on both sites agreed to call the newer My-Life Your-Life instead.

After Aaron finishes copying all of his text and refining it, he submits it to My-Life and leans back. Looking back on his older posts, most of them received no comments and sometimes even no views. He doesn't mind the fact that his rather ordinary work - perhaps subordinary even - is not going to receive any engagement.

Aaron thinks back about the latest comment on one of his posts. It was from a few months ago. The comment was written as if they forgot to turn off the Caps-Lock. It said that he needs to stop trashing the website and told him that it was not necessary to publish a calculation about his 'pull per minute' and 'blast per day', which was quite a friendly wording by Aaron for something this sexual. Aaron didn't mind it much. If he weren't to talk about his sexual life, then he could as well have gone on Your-Life for how short his posts would have become.

He switches to Your-Life, which coincidentally has a private messaging section identical to every other platform. Aaron notices that his only acquaintance is currently online. One hour into a conversation, he addresses the commenter from months ago. His acquaintance criticises him, asking why he would ever see the need to write something like that. Instead of telling his acquaintance that his posts would get too short, he comes up with a different reason.

"If there's a historian from the year 4430 and wants to figure out how a boring life used to look like, my autobiography would be the perfect place to look for!

"Right? Right?

"And I wouldn't want to 'fake' my life for this, would I? So, I should not hide my sexual preferences! I need to stay accurate for the sake of science!

The cursor blinks as neither of them continue talking. After a dozen seconds, Aaron adds on.

"At least I would be able to live on for longer after my death."

He thinks of the quote and tries to recite it.

"You probably know it: 'You die twice: First as your consciousness fades away and then as the memories from everyone's mind about you fade away.'"